Being Unprepared

A lot of bile is being spilt by people all over trying to pin the blame for what's going on, or rather NOT going on down in New Orleans. The biggest complaint from the Angry Left seems to focus on the Bush administration diverting money from upgrading the levy system in New Orleans (SELA) to the war in Iraq.

While these people are trying to score political points, they really miss a larger point.

For the last 4 years, this country has spent billions of dollars to set up an infrastructure to handle a terrorist attack that destroys part, or even all, of a US city. That's what the Department of Homland Security was all about. In the event of a disaster, our government would have a prepared rapid response to devastation.

Well, look at what has actually happened. A city was leveled. New Orleans is, essentially, gone. Sure, the cause was the force of nature and not a terrorist attack, but the net effect was the same. This is what DHS is here for. Beyond FEMA, the whole point of DHS was to handle situations just like this.

So, how have four years of planning and billions of dollars spent helped?

Minimally.

There are two conclusions as to why DHS and FEMA have been so ineffectual:

1) Relief efforts on this scale are not possible in this situation.
2) Relief efforts have been ineffective because of incompetent planning.

Clearly, some of each of those is what's going on here. With roads underwater, even had these buses been staged out of the flood zone, there's no guarantee they could have reached everyone in need.

But there is also clearly a high level of incompetence going on here. Looking at disasters like the Kobe Earthquake, the tsunami victims, and other disasters around the globe, it's clear the response should have been better.

Option 2 gets the bulk of the blame in my book. Let's be clear that the blame is not just on the Bush Administration, but on the State of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans as well.

Bush is going to take the biggest hit, though. How confident are we all that DHS could handle a dirty bomb in downtown Seattle that goes off as a surprise as opposed to a Hurricane Katrina that gave us days of notice?

I'll tell you that I have none.